What’s Up THIS WEEK: New Social Media Law? Email Trending Tactic? Stranger Things? 😱 | Ep. 472

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for what's up this week from the Do This Not That podcast. This is our super short episode. We'll break down what's going on in business and marketing and life, and then we still have our other episodes later in the week. So what's going on? Well, as the new year rolled out, there have been some new laws related to social media and stuff, and this one is pretty wild.

0:34Have you heard about this? This is real. This is in Virginia, the state of Virginia, and it kicked off January 1st. And now this is into effect. Okay. That social media scrolling time for users under the age of 16 is now limited to one hour a day in the state of Virginia. This is now in effect and it's, it's a real deal thing. And so basically all the big platforms, you know, Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, Reddit, all of them, including YouTube, okay, they have to now default to a limit of 60 minutes for users that are 15 years and younger. Now, the big question is, well, what happens if you're 15 and you're on, you know, YouTube for 61 minutes?

1:22Well, a couple things. First off, in order to change the setting, your parent needs to go on there and kind of change the setting. If the platforms don't adhere to this, you know, YouTube or Facebook or whatever, then they could face civil penalties. And look, it's a good start. I think it's going to be really, really tough to get this thing growing in the right direction. Believe it or not, there's already lawsuits trying to fight its implementation by all these different free speech groups. But this is here. And you know what? I think there's going to be a cascading effect. So that's super interesting that that's actually now rolled out in the state of Virginia.

2:02So other things that are going, this is so random. There was some new data out from World Data Research about a tactic that we've been testing that actually works really, really well that is from data from the last 90 days, which is pretty cool. And it's along the lines of this whole idea of that AI stuff makes our marketing content really generic. Everyone just scrolls past it. So are there any tactics, tips, little things that you can do? And this one's so small. So when you're sending out your email marketing campaign, you have a subject line, right? So what you want to test, and this is the data, is actually using no capitalization whatsoever, not capitalizing the first letter of the first word, not capitalizing anything in your subject line.

2:46Why? Because of course, when you write a normal subject line, you'll have capitalization. But if you use AI to help you write a subject line, it will do title casing often in your subject line, which is when it capitalizes the first letter of each word in your subject line. So if you do the reverse of that, and this applies to all marketing, if you do the reverse of what AI would normally give you back, you actually see a boost. So when you have no capitalization at all for a business or consumer email marketing subject line, we're seeing that lift email open rates according to World Data Research by about 14%.

3:18So that's a good A-B test to try. Why not? So other thing, new data that's coming out that just came out in the past few weeks from Forbes. Forbes came out with the data. This is pretty wild. And there's something we need to do about it from a marketing perspective. 24 % of all humans now go to social media as their primary search tool. That's pretty wild. Then eMarketer at the same time in the last week came out data that said over 50 % of Gen Z start their product discovery journey on TikTok or Instagram bypassing search engines. Now, what does this mean for us as marketers, whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer?

3:59What we need to understand is what changed in the fourth quarter of this past year was that Google started to index content on social media posts, meaning that Google was actually looking at the transcripts, the words, the comments in social media posts on things like TikTok and Instagram and using them in discovery when people are searching. And then of course, when you're on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, and people are looking for things, it really is now dependent on the words that are in your posts, the words that you're saying on your video posts. If there are captions in your video posts, if there are overlay texts in your video posts that are speaking to the topic that you hope people search for.

4:45And it's really important now to be much more intentional thinking about not being cute or clever in how you're captioning a post on social media or whether or not you are captioning a video post. You need to be doing these things because that is where search is taking place. It is now absolute table stakes to make sure that your social media posts on LinkedIn, on TikTok and Instagram are really factoring into the algorithm looking to index all the words and comments and things that are going on. All right, let's talk about some nonsense things, pop culture, what is going on? So first of all, I just saw that Avatar 3, Fire and Ash hit a billion dollars.

5:28I don't understand something. Do you know anybody on earth who's seen this movie? Like legitimately, it hits a billion dollars. Who's seen Avatar 3? First of all, who cares? I know I'm going to hate for that. Oh my God, Avatar is the greatest thing of all time. Good for you. But it's amazing to me. This thing hit a billion dollars. I don't know a single person. Nobody in my universe have I said, oh my God, Avatar was great. Zero people. I can't even believe this is true. This is actually ridiculous. I know Stranger Things finally is in the rear view. I had to see the end. I actually don't care.

6:02I want all that time back. I don't know. I don't know how i feel about any of it who cares i'm done with stranger things i'm very into all the reality shows are coming back uh i cannot believe that kyle and mo from the real housewives of beverly hills look like they're getting back together nobody cares about me this is kind of disturbing to me um that's my own problem i'll tell you about another problem i'm gonna get so much trouble for this but you know what show is coming back it's actually coming back in the next few days on TLC, but the show, My Strange Addiction. Now, first off, let me just say something.

6:38This is not about alcohol or drug abuse or whatever, and mental health is a big deal. I am not belittling people that have mental health issues at all, but this show is next level. It is next level. I used to watch all the old episodes. They haven't had a new season in a while. So what goes on in this show is when they talk about my strange addictions, they're highlighting people that are addicted to really wild stuff. So I don't know what the new season is going to have that's coming out like right now. But I remember, okay, there was this one dude, Nathaniel, okay? And on one of the episodes, he had a romantic and physical relationship with a 1998 Chevy Monte Carlo car.

7:25okay i i would watch this episode like what if he was kissing the car he was talking the car he took it on dates i i mean this was wild and then the other one was well there was a few other there was also a woman who married the eiffel tower that was strange um she was what uh what was the word she was an objectophile which is someone that feels deeply and has a connection to like a physical structure. Okay. I think I have an ejecta file to coffee. Definitely to French fries. And then there was one, oh my goodness, I'm going to get so much trouble. Everyone's like, you can't talk about this stuff.

8:04Well, here I am. It's not my fault. It was on TLC. What do you want from me? There was a woman who was, I remember the episode was called the drywall eater because she would eat drywall every week. She ate like, like many feet worth of drywall and she loved it. I mean, it didn't make me want to go out and try to eat drywall. But anyway, this show is coming back, which is probably the end of humanity. The fact that they brought it back. What does that even say? I don't know what that says about me talking about it. I don't know what I'm talking about. So yeah, that is what's going on. So I hope you're getting the year off to a great start.

8:43And I'll check in the next one later. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what? I want to do even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com and we can partner there. You could find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff. And if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com and we could stay connected. You could find my newsletter and everything else I got going on. Thanks for being here and hope you subscribe.